Oh the Irony

Back in 1999, I wrote a paper for the First IFIP Working Conference on Software Architecture, entitled "Views and viewpoints in software systems architecture". If you are interested in that sort of thing, you can find it here
(PDF).

It had a nice history of the idea of "views" in software architecture, surveyed precursors to that notion from software engineering, and examined the ideas in (then-current) use. It's a bit polemical in places (there was an on-going debate at the time about software architectures described with multiple views vs. a single dominant structural organization of components and connectors).

Today we know a lot more about views and viewpoints, and it could use a refresh or update, but that is not the point of this story.

The paper is rarely referenced, so I was surprised to find it cited by a US patent examiner: US 7,043,695 in a 2006 patent on "Object positioning and display in virtual environments"! Nothing to do with software architecture views and models!

The morale, if there is one? Our patent system is out of control.

Please join the League for Programming Freedom, and help fight software patents.